In Oulu, Finland between 2005 and 2013 a 35-year-old woman
(whose name is being withheld by the government) was found to have killed five
of her own newborn children and hid their corpses in a freezer. The crimes were
discovered on June 4, 2014. The mother claimed they had all been stillborn. It
was a lie. It was determined, using dental evidence, that some of the victims
had lived up to four days before they were dumped into a bucket where they
perished from exposure and starvation.

The first two infant victims were fathered by different,
unidentified, men. The Oulu mother married a man in 2010, gave birth to another
baby and killed it, reporting to the father that their child had miscarried.
The couple conceived two more children and, as as is seen in so many cases of
maternal filicide, the mother seems to have convinced that father that the
signs of pregnancy were the result of ordinary weight gain. The father of the
three murdered children filed for divorce immediately after the bodies were
discovered. All of the babies were born full-term or nearly full-term,
according to the statements of the prosecutor.

On December 16, 2014 the Oulu
District Prosecutor Sari Kemppaine demanded that theOulu District Court reduce the gravity of the
charges against the mother, from murder to aggravated assaults and aggravated
manslaughter. The prosecutor used the terms “gross negligence” to describe the
cause of all five deaths.

On June 15, 2015 at the District Court of Oulu, the mother
was convicted of killing the five infants and was sentenced to a nominal “life”
sentence, which in Finland means she will likely serve only 12 years for the
deaths.